Inspector of Youzhou (4)
It was the hour when Liu Bei and Gongsun Zan sat sharing drinks.
Zhang Fei appeared before Guan Yu, who was standing guard at the door.
"Sister Yunchang."
"So you have returned."
Zhang Fei had declared she would commit the city's layout to memory as she made her rounds, and she opened her mouth the moment she got back.
"Sister Xuande's still at it?"
"She is. Drinking longer than I expected."
They had worried that Gongsun Zan might attempt something untoward, but nothing of the sort happened. Pricking up their ears and listening closely, they found the two were doing nothing more than drink and trade stories like any ordinary pair of acquaintances.
"Man. There must be a mountain of booze in there."
"……"
"Where'd the man even get that much liquor?"
"Yide."
Zhang Fei's words carried a teasing, almost mocking lilt, and Guan Yu cast a word of caution before the remark could be taken the wrong way.
Zhang Fei shrugged, the Serpent Spear slung across her shoulder.
"Fine, fine. I'll keep it down."
She had scanned her surroundings on the way here, and Gongsun Zan's guards were dug in at every corner, posted with the air of men determined not to let a single insect slip past. Their loyalty, at least, deserved some credit, she thought — not that it would save them. Any one of them would crumple flat before a single blow.
Putting her superhuman physique to use, Zhang Fei had given the city a rough tour in record time, and now she settled into place beside Guan Yu. Guan Yu spared her a brief sidelong glance, then faced forward again and returned her focus to the watch.
Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. Generals whom later ages would hail as "the beauty worth a golden house" and "Matches for Ten Thousand." The guards of Gongsun Zan standing nearby could only watch the pair with taut, nervous faces. To any eye, the room those two defended looked less like a chamber than an iron bastion that no one alive could ever breach.
The next day.
Liu Bei, who had finished her meeting with Gongsun Zan and returned to her room to sleep, felt the full weight of her hangover the instant she opened her eyes — a headache like her skull was about to split, and a queasy churning in her gut that threatened to bring everything back up at any moment.
"……"
To feel this wrecked even after pacing herself. Granted, she really had drunk far too much the night before. She was no stranger to alcohol, but neither was she a tank like Zhang Fei. And what was she to do, when every time she drained her cup, Gongsun Zan was right there to fill it again? On paper the two of them were fellow disciples under the same master, but set their positions side by side and the gulf between them stretched as wide as heaven and earth. One was the northern hegemon who had cast out Inspector Liu Yu and gathered the whole of You Province into his fist. The other was a drifter who had never once managed to settle anywhere, wandering the realm from end to end. At last night's table, the one holding every card had been Gongsun Zan, and the one playing them had been Liu Bei. The party had only wound down when the liquor he had laid in was all but drained.
Through all of it, Liu Bei had fought off the drowsiness crashing over her in waves, straining to the very limit of her will not to black out. And when it finally ended and she staggered out of the room, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were there as though they had been waiting all along, catching her under the arms. After that, her memory simply ended.
Liu Bei had just pushed herself upright and was looking slowly around the room when the door cracked open and someone's head poked through.
"Oh — you're up?"
She must have been standing guard outside, for Zhang Fei spoke with nothing but her head stuck through the doorway. She swept the interior with a quick glance, then said in a voice touched with relief,
"I nearly jumped out of my skin. Thought somebody else had gotten in there."
"What on earth do you mean?"
Had someone tried to sneak into her room while she slept? Liu Bei's voice shot up in alarm, but Zhang Fei only shook her head.
"I just thought I heard somebody moving around in there, so I came to check."
"……"
"And the somebody turned out to be you, Sister Liu Bei?"
Senses that sharp came with their own problems, apparently — Zhang Fei smiled, a little sheepish.
Ever since the old days, Liu Bei had always felt something oddly indescribable stir in her whenever she witnessed her sworn sisters' more-than-human faculties.
Perhaps she caught the strange look Liu Bei was giving her, for Zhang Fei asked in concern,
"You okay, Sister Xuande? Want to rest a bit more?"
Liu Bei answered with a smile. The hangover was brutal, but if she set her mind to it, she could bear it easily enough.
"No, I'm fine. Come in."
"Okay."
Zhang Fei, who had been hovering with only her head through the door, finally stepped into the room.
"Where's Yunchang?"
Bemused by Guan Yu's absence, Liu Bei put the question to Zhang Fei.
"Guarding the room outside, same as me."
With that Zhang Fei stopped halfway through the door and pushed it wide open. Liu Bei leaned over a little and, just as Zhang Fei had said, spied Guan Yu standing sentry by the door.
"Yunchang, you come in too."
"…Should not one of us remain to guard Lady Xuande?"
It was Guan Yu, after all — proper and unbending in her every movement.
"You can guard me just as well from in here, with Zhang Fei."
"……"
"Don't worry. There are no enemies in this city."
For now. Liu Bei swallowed the last two words and smiled, calm and even.
"…As you will."
Reassured by that, Guan Yu entered the room with a bearing noticeably lighter. Liu Bei watched her take a seat beside Zhang Fei, then spoke.
"There's something I've been curious about. Just a personal thing — may I ask?"
"……"
At that, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei traded a brief glance, then both nodded.
"Ask, by all means."
"Sure, go ahead."
Grateful for their leave, Liu Bei smiled her thanks and began, slowly.
"It really is — truly a nothing question, but…"
"……"
"How am I when I drink?"
"…?"
An utterly out-of-the-blue question. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei put on identical looks of puzzlement at the same moment.
But for Liu Bei it was a thing she simply had to know. What had Gongsun Zan been thinking as he kept topping off her cup? Picking through her hazy memory, she could picture him watching her with a smile of pure, unalloyed delight. She had felt the same odd prodding from Zhang Fei, too — whenever the two of them drank together, the liquor had a way of finding its way to her cup. Aside from her habit of suddenly keeling over, was there something else about the way she drank?
The first to answer was Guan Yu.
"Nothing beyond your tendency to doze off, my lady."
"Is that so?"
If Guan Yu — who held her liquor every bit as well as Zhang Fei — said so, then at the very least Liu Bei had done nothing out of the ordinary. Relieved in a small way, she turned her gaze to Zhang Fei.
"And you, Yide? You kept easing drinks onto me, one after another."
"……You noticed that?"
"That sort of thing, I never miss."
Unable to hold Liu Bei's grin, Zhang Fei let her eyes slide away. A short moment passed before she worked up to it.
"It's just… the way you kept bobbing off, Sister Xuande. It was funny."
"……"
"It was, really!"
A trifling reason, and nothing more. So was that all it had been for Gongsun Zan, too — the sight of her head drooping again and again? He was savage by temperament, true, but Gongsun Zan was not the kind of man to stretch a slimy hand toward those he counted among his own. If he had been, things between him and Liu Bei would have soured long ago, back when they studied under Lu Zhi.
"Yide."
"Uh — yeah?"
Liu Bei regarded Zhang Fei, who was still sneaking glances at her face.
"How was the city? What did you see, going around?"
"……"
At the question, Zhang Fei closed her mouth and cast a slow, deliberate look around the room. Feeling out whether anyone might be listening at the walls, she confirmed no one was near, and only then did she speak.
"Honestly? It's not a good city."
Zhang Fei brought back to mind the city she had scoured the day before. Small children and old folk too busy hiding to breathe at the barest flicker of a soldier's shadow. Streets uncannily, completely drained of anyone young. It could only mean one thing — the city's new master had done something foul to the people under his rule.
It was, in the world as it now stood, the most ordinary and unremarkable kind of disorder: the utterly commonplace sight of theft breaking out here and quarrels flaring there, all through the city. And it was among the things Zhang Fei hated most.
Memory surfaced of the battle at Hulao Pass long ago, and Zhang Fei let out a long sigh.
"…Maybe I shouldn't have spared him at all."
If she had known what manner of man he was, she would simply have left him to that red-haired brat back then and let him be pounded to death on the spot. He treated his own people handsomely — which was exactly why she had been so slow to catch on. Too late, and far too late at that.
Liu Bei, watching her sister, could only wear a faint, bitter smile. They had been in this city barely a day, and already Gongsun Zan's doting attentiveness toward her party was impossible to miss. He had handed over a room this fine without asking a single coin, and the table came in groaning under delicacies from mountain and sea alike. One could choose to see it as nothing more than a proper welcome for a rare guest, long unseen.
But Gongsun Zan was not a man who would lavish such luxury on anyone, however treasured the guest. Liu Bei had a fair sense of what lay behind his generosity. A scheme, was it not, to burden their hearts with debt — until leaving his side became something they could no longer easily do. They had once taken instruction under the same teacher, and so Gongsun Zan knew her character well.
Had this been the past, the odds were good that she would have known — and still found herself unable to walk away.
"……"
But that was then, not now.
"Well then — what shall we do next?"
Liu Bei said it smiling. There was someone who had shown her the same kindness, and in that someone she had seen hope.
And that, she knew for certain, was something she would never feel in Gongsun Zan.